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iodine doesn't work

Job01

Posts: 5
Joined: Feb 2007

Feb 20, 2007 - 4:30 pm

Does anyone know what the treatment is if iodine doens't work. My thyroglobulin is still at 6,5 after three treatments and now they will make PET scan. I have the fealing that my life expectiations dropped from 95% to a much lower percentage. Does anybody experienced the same?

Well, from what I know if they can't kill it with iodine they use direct radiation therapy. You can find a description of this therapy in the Thyroid Sourcebook by Sara Rosenthal. Her treatment was successful and I bet yours will be too!

I am still at the beginning of my treatment. I had Iodine therapy about three and a half months ago. At a little before the 3mos mark I had a Tg reading of about 16.4. Out of curiosity do you remember what your Tg was at about this time?

There are reasons that iodine may not work as well as expected. It could be because the remaining areas are iodine resistant (have mutated to a less 'thyroid like' type of cells), but there can be other reasons, too.

If the area is too big, ie more than 1cm, radioactive iodine often will not penetrate that - so surgery would be the best option. Another thing could be that you have too much iodine in your body - did you do a stringent low-iodine diet for at least 7 days prior to treatment, and at least 48 hours afterwards? Even multivitamins can interfere with your iodine uptake, so this can be very, very important to the success of treatments.

Lastly, sometimes a higher dose of radioactive iodine is more successful. Some doctors try to treat with very low doses of radioactive iodine (ie 50mCi's) when the location of remaining tissues may 'call for' a dose of 150mCi's or more.

The PET scan is a very good idea - if the tissues have mutated, they will often show up on the PET when nothing is seen on I-131 scans - this article is 'clinical', but may be of interest to you:
http://jnm.snmjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/986

All the best, and I hope they can track down the site that is producing that thyroglobulin for you!

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